A few days after Christmas, Pastor Peter Dugulescu opened the door of the hospital ward where Daniel Gavra had been taken after he was shot. The boy was still recuperating, his wounds bandaged and a stump where his left leg had been. But Daniel’s spirit had not been shattered. “Pastor,” he said, “I don’t mind so much the loss of my leg. After all, it was I who lit the first candle.”
During this week in 1989, the revolution began that overthrew the Communist regime in Romania. My wife still remembers the fear and uncertainty of living through those days.
Chuck Colson’s book, Being the Body, tells the story with an eye to the role of the Church. It all began with a Hungarian Reformed congregation that would rather bring down the government than part with their pastor…
The following is an abbreviated excerpt from Colson’s Being the Body. I hope you will pick up the book and read the whole story.
Communism and the Rise of Nicolae Ceausescu
In the 1940’s and 50’s, under young leaders like Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania’s nightmare began. Multiplying like cockroaches, the Communists eliminated the light of opposition any way they could. Students and peasants, pastors and priests – over the years, millions were thrown into prison. Many died there.
Meanwhile, Ceausescu climbed through the party ranks, dreaming of the day Romania would be his. By the early 1970’s his dream had come true. He was president of the country, with the party and the army firmly behind him.
Ruling from a kitschy Versailles-style palace in Bucharest, Ceausescu brutally plundered Romania and reshaped it in his own sick image. Romania’s soil has been called the most fertile in Eastern Europe, yet the Ceausescu government starved its people. While citizens shivered in long lines to buy bread laced with sawdust, the government shipped most of Romania’s food abroad. Meat, butter, sugar, oil and flour were strictly rationed. Vegetables were scarce, citrus fruits nonexistent.
While their people competed for bony chickens and occasional pork knuckles, the Ceausescu and top party officials had difficulty keeping their cholesterol levels in check. A menu from a birthday dinner for Elena Ceausescu make Marie Antoinette seem frugal.
“Systematization” and the “Securitate”
When he wasn’t choosing which type of caviar to consume, Ceausescu was promoting his pet program of “systematization,” which razed thousands of rural villages and transferred their citizens to apartment blocks in designated urban-industrial centers.
Raw concrete and exposed joints pockmarked these mid-rise flats that were a warren of dark, tiny rooms and flimsy walls, smelling of sewage and old garbage. Heated by a central system controlled by some sadistic state functionary, the blocks were maintained at about fifty degrees during the winter.
Many families had hot water only once a week, and electricity was rationed as well. Forty-watt bulbs were the highest wattage allowed in homes that had current only certain hours a day, and bulbs were removed from streetlights. At night the roads were utterly black, flanked by worthless steel stalks.
Meanwhile the Securitate, a spidery network of secret police that webbed the country, enforced the wretched status quo. An estimated one in four citizens informed for the secret police, who harassed and imprisoned anyone who didn’t salute the regime.
A Reformed Church On Fire for Christ
Laszlo Tokes, a large, handsome man with deep, compelling voice, had become pastor of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the center of Timisoara in 1987. Tokes quickly gained immense popularity, not only with the elderly in his congregation, but also with students from the university.
While the Communists weren’t particularly concerned about the old people, they did care about the students. Religion should have been irrelevant to this generation coming of age in the last decade of the century of Lenin.
Tokes mourned for his town and his country. The secularism of the atheistic regime had bitten deep into the hearts of the people. Still, he knew the church could help set those hearts on fire. His Reformed faith had given Tokes eyes to see what could happen when the church understood its identity, when the people stopped thinking of their faith as just a Sunday morning ritual and understood that the church was the community of the people of God that could infiltrate the world.
Tokes found dusty baptismal records of families who had once been part of the church but had dropped away because of the collaborator’s empty rites. Tokes invited them back. New converts were baptized. New tithes came in. The celebration of Communion took on new meaning as parishioners remembered the body and blood of Christ and realized that, indeed, the risen Christ was among them.
Within two years, the membership rolls of the Timisoara Hungarian Reformed Church had swelled to five thousand. But the growth was more than numbers; people were being discipled.
Both the Securiate and the ecclesiastical superiors knew they could not allow the church to continue like this. Tokes’ booming voice proclaiming the Word of God from the pulpit echoed in their minds like a bad dream. There was no place for this passionate Christian faith in Ceausescu’s Romania.
